THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE MOSQUE

THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE MOSQUE; Brooklyn Muslims Disputing Any Ties to Terror

By ANDY NEWMAN

Published: March 5, 2003

Surrounded by Islamic incense shops and booksellers on Atlantic Avenue in the Boerum Hill neighborhood, imposing Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn has a history of raising money for Osama bin Laden, dating to the days when Mr. bin Laden and the United States had a common enemy in the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan.

Those days were supposed to be gone, though. Five years ago, the imam at the time, Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, said that ''in 1994, this mosque finally settled down'' and broke ties with terrorists.

Yesterday, however, news crews crowded around the mosque again, drawn by the federal government's charge that a Yemeni cleric bragged last year that he had raised money for Al Qaeda through the mosque.

Two doors down, at the House of Knowledge, a sort of Islamic department store that carries religious books, bumper stickers and gadgets like a plug-in device that ''automatically prays when you start your vehicle,'' the owner, Abdul-Rahman Farhane, said terrorism was denounced at the mosque.

''Sometimes they talk about it,'' said Mr. Farhane, a member of the mosque, as a video monitor above his head showed a PBS documentary about Muslims in which a narrator was saying that the 9/11 attacks were antithetical to Islamic values.

''They say this is not Islam,'' Mr. Farhane continued, ''that it is not right to kill innocent people.''

Al Farooq Mosque, Mr. Farhane said, raises money ''only to help poor or needy people,'' and if it turned out that ''they turn the money for something else, I would feel bad.''

A spokesman for the mosque's current imam, Abdul Rahman, who has been there about a year, said the mosque was ''very, very surprised'' by the allegations. The spokesman, Mohammed Nagi, said it followed American law in its financial dealings.

The government released few details in its case against the cleric, Mohammed Al Hasan al-Moayad, about a supposed Brooklyn link to Al Qaeda.

The Department of Justice said in court papers filed yesterday that an unnamed Yemeni sheik who has visited the United States several times in recent years to raise money for Mr. bin Laden visited the mosque in December 1999 with instructions to ask for money for families to be sponsored. The court papers imply that he collected about $10,000 there.

The government said that Mr. Moayad told an informer last year that he had received money for the jihad that was collected at the mosque. It also said that a Yemeni businessman in Brooklyn told a government informer that he sometimes transferred money for Mr. Moayad.

The government would not say officially yesterday if there was a connection between the case of Mr. Moayad and a roundup last June of 12 Yemeni shopkeepers in Brooklyn on charges that they smuggled money out of the United States.

But a senior law enforcement official said there was some link, although he would provide no details. The official said that much of the money Mr. Moayad received was raised from Yemeni merchants, including bodega owners in the area, though it was unclear whether the donors knew where their money was going.

''I don't want to indict the whole Yemeni merchant community,'' the official said, ''but it's pretty safe to assume that there are sympathizers in the group.''

Only a handful of men came to the mosque for 3:30 p.m. prayers yesterday. One of them, Otabek Muminov, 25, a picture framer from Uzbekistan who lives in Bay Ridge, said that he had no wish to support terrorism. But he added, ''Every place they collect money, but nobody knows where it's going.''

Photo: Al Farooq Mosque raises money to help the poor, said Muslims who pray there, though some said they did not know where it went. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)